


I know you wanna go to heaven but you're human tonight

by SongsofSamael



Series: B A D L A N D S [3]
Category: Bandom, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: M/M, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-27
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-23 15:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4882462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SongsofSamael/pseuds/SongsofSamael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in which a folk tale is attempted to be attached to the lore of Panic! At the Disco.<br/>Totally fiction, Ryan and Brendon are (probably) not really demons.<br/>3/16 of the Badlands series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I know you wanna go to heaven but you're human tonight

The Devil took him the way Devil took most young men with religion in their rearview mirrors: unexpectedly, like a detour on the highway in the pouring rain when the weather called for sun.  
Brendon Urie met the Devil at a strip-mall in Las Vegas; the naïve young man following the neon prophesies of sex sold by the Prada knockoff, his long legs carrying him through weaving, twisting mazes of the desert’s desaturated pastels intermingling with jagged mid-afternoon shadows.   
“Sit down,” said the Devil, in his soft voice, a voice like grass with the wind blowing through its blades. Brendon looked around. The last thing he’d remembered was giving his family the slip to seek out greater fortunes than the overeager Mormon nature would allow, and trying to escape the heat of the August sunshine on the strip.  
Now he stood in what seemed to be a mint green waiting room with a rug that hadn’t left the 1970’s when it had the misfortune of being manufactured. He felt awkward, uneasy, unsure. The Devil didn’t seem like the way the Devil was described in the Bible. He hadn’t expected Satan to have big brown eyes or wear a bunch of florals, nor glittery swirls of eye makeup. If anything, Lucifer had manifested in the somewhat soft version of a postmodern hippie.  
“My name is Ryan,” said the Devil. Somewhat disappointing, considering the magnanimous names that came with most spawn of the Underworld. Not even so much as a ‘Bub’ for ‘Beelzebub’. The small demon smiled up at the tall and baffled youth, his fingers steepled and his eyes strangely kind.  
How he knew Ryan was the Devil was beyond Brendon. It was a nagging in his gut that wasn’t quite enough to be fear—more like excitement. It was more like…a heat; a desert heat, that crawled up from his lower belly to make his veins sing a lava chorus of bubbling want. Of suppressed lightning compressed under pale and sunburnt skin. It all came down to the way Ryan looked at him, with a knowing expression and a subtle smile that implied he’d seen every garage tantrum and every frantic scribbling of words late into the night when the sweats took him and the fever couldn’t be sweated out in any other way. It was a fit of passion. It was unholy.  
“Do you feel,” Ryan-the-devil asked as he applied another line of glittering green beneath his eye, “like a young god?”  
Brendon had a choice to make.   
He could retreat; go back, find his family and continue to preach the word through gritted teeth, feeling the sun bake his neck red, go to church every Sunday. He could wear a suit that didn’t fit right, he could pursue the family dream of adorning the cloth, or however it went.  
Or he could take the hand covered in shine, doused in sparkles, that extended itself in the dimly sunny room like a statue salute chipped from stardust. And who knew what kind of future he’d have then? What heresy awaited him if he decided; yes, he’d take that hand, and follow where it led…  
We all know what he chose.

* * *  
Fast forward a few years down the road, when the Devil himself is afraid of this boy, when the world is lit up by the same fever Brendon once had. He wears a suit that fits; and it’s almost as though the Devil donned a brand new blue dress. He’s crowned in jewels of concert sweat and haloed by a thousand fiery lights that is his stage of choice. He used to be so scared; hiding behind his circus frills and his cabarets, everything an act like a new circle of Hell, performed through frantic hands and desperate eyes.  
Now he embraces it. He dances in the tongues of flame; sheds his secondary skins with serpentine grace. His campy carnival act is contained to backflips that leave his young followers gasping. When he sings; his voice carries up to Heaven and shakes the stars; he spits defiance in the form of blunt commentary and cruel smiles.   
Sometimes his eyes go dark and his jaw clenches, and he looks off to the dark places where the Devil ought to have been, standing beside his Young God with a proud expression; for he had seen what he had made, and it was good.   
But like a child made in any image of Lucifer, there was rebellion.  
And now the Young God conducts a choir on his own, with upraised hands and manic laughter; burning ballrooms down with fervor, the darkest angel of them all, drowning his prayers and thoughts out with sound.


End file.
